Piers Beirne

Piers Beirne is an Anglo-Irish sociologist and legal scholar, emeritus professor at the University of Southern Maine, who has been based in the United States since 1976 and is recognized as a leading figure in green criminology. Beirne is particularly known for his work on animal abuse as a subject of criminological study in its own right, examining cruelty toward animals both as a harm worth studying for its own sake and, in some cases, as a behavior linked to later interpersonal violence. He is credited as the founder of nonspeciesist criminology, an approach that extends criminology's traditional focus on harms between humans to include harms committed by humans against other species, and his book Confronting Animal Abuse: Law, Criminology, and Human-Animal Relationships examines how legal systems have historically treated cruelty toward animals.